


What You Say About His Company

by David_Ginsberg



Category: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 09:30:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21371926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/David_Ginsberg/pseuds/David_Ginsberg
Summary: An attempted rewrite of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a modern setting, with Huck Finn as the narrator who can't tell if his crush on Tom is requited or not.
Relationships: Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer/Becky Thatcher
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	What You Say About His Company

I first met Tom Sawyer on the first day of fourth grade. It was the year after Mom died, and Dad hadn’t thought to help me get dressed for school. I ended up going to school with no shoes or socks on (figuring that if there was no grown-up to make me, there was no need to wear them) and Joe Harper made fun of me for being barefooted in the classroom. Tom came over to us and took off his own shoes, declaring that I’d had an excellent idea and his feet felt much better without being cooped up in stinky old shoes. He and I had been best friends ever since. It probably helped that we were both orphans, of a sort. Tom was a real orphan – his parents had died in a car crash when he was four and he lived with his brother Sid, his Aunt Polly, and his cousin Mary – I don’t know what happened to Aunt Polly’s husband and I never had the temerity to ask.

I was technically only half an orphan. I lived with my Dad, off and on. Sometimes he was out of town, and when he came back into town he’d beat up on me enough that the teachers noticed it and I got sent to a group home for a few weeks, but his shack down by the river wasn’t worth the trouble for anyone else to squat in, and I wasn’t worth the trouble for social services to track me down when the teachers weren’t trying to pawn me off on them, so I could always come back there when I wanted to.

Anyway, the point of all this is that Tom and I were unusually close, so when he got detention for fighting with Alfred Temple (Alfred had just moved to St. Petersburg from St. Louis, and clearly thought himself superior to us rednecks), I decided to visit him the next day to cheer him up. I knew that he would be grounded, but I could usually talk my way past Aunt Polly.

When I got to the house, there was a crowd of people standing around the fence with paintbrushes and buckets of paint. There was a banner hung over the whole scene reading “Keep St. Petersburg Beautiful.”

I found Tom in the midst of the crowd. He seemed to be directing the whole thing.

“What the hell is going on?”

Tom handed me a paintbrush “Civic beautification project. We’re going through town painting these fences that have got worn out looking to help make a difference in our community.”

I handed the brush back. “Your aunt told you to paint the fence as punishment, didn’t she?”

“Shhh…” Tom whispered, “I had them paint three other fences to keep them from getting suspicious.”

“What about Sid?”

“I made enough racket this morning that he ran off to the library to study. By the way, look over there.”

I followed Tom’s gaze to see a miserable-looking Alfred Temple being supervised by his mother in applying a coat of paint to the fence.

“Nice going.”

“You want an apple?”

“Sure.”

Tom tossed me a Red Delicious and we watched the crowd of fence painters until they had covered the entirety of the fence and began handing in their brushes.

Tom clapped his hands. “Thank y’all for coming out, and remember the beach cleanup starts tomorrow at 9:00 a.m.”

The crowd slowly dissipated until only me and Tom were left.

“You think you can escape for the day?” I asked him.

“No, I’ve got to look like a pitiful fence-painter for Aunt Polly.”

“Well, go on and pitiful yourself then. I’ll see you in school.”

I ambled back home, lit up a cigarette, and cast my fishing line in the water. It took me all day to secure a week’s supply of catfish. I fried one up for supper and then went to bed.

That night, I dreamed about Tom. He was naked in my bed and we were doing, well, things boys ain’t supposed to do with each other. I have to admit it was a much nicer dream than the ones I have sometimes about my Dad chasing after me.

When I woke up my blanket was sticky again, and so was I, so I decided to go for a bath in the river, after I’d had my coffee. I brought my soap and washcloth and washed myself all over, which soon turned to fiddling with myself, but it didn’t create any more mess since I was underwater.

After that, I paddled around in the river a bit. I swam out to Jackson’s Island and then back. When I returned, I saw a crowd of people on the beach, carrying plastic trash bags. They were poking at stuff on the beach and putting it in the trash bag. After thinking it over for a minute, I realized that they must be Tom’s beach cleanup. I spotted Alfred Temple, and Ms. Douglas. Ms. Douglas was my occasional foster mother, an old maid, and a very strong Christian. She was adamantly opposed to sin, especially the fun kinds of sin like smoking and touching yourself and skinny dipping. If she saw me coming out of the river naked she was liable to call social services and then I’d really be in a fix.

I swam as quietly as I could over to the bank, where the overhanging tree limbs gave me a measure of protection. I still needed to work out a way to get up the grassy hill to my house. I felt a big rock with my toe, much too large to skip but large enough to serve as a distraction. I picked it up and hurled it as far as I could past the beach-cleaners. Just as I’d hoped, they all turned around to look at it, and I was able to dash uphill to my house.

The door slammed shut behind me, and I heard one of the beachcleaners exclaim. “Look at that awful old shack! Do you think we should pull it down?”

I hurried to pull on a pair of shorts and flung open the door before they came up with a plan to bulldoze my house.

“Hey!” I shouted “this is private property. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I recognized the woman who answered me as Alfred Temple’s mother. “We’re cleaning the river bank. It’s for the St. Petersburg Community Cleanup.”

“Clean up your own damn bank! If you don’t get out of here I’ll tell my Dad you were trespassing on his property.”

That scared one of the locals participating in the clean-up enough for her to pull Mrs. Temple back and convince her to apply her community spirit someplace else. Once I was certain they’d gone I ambled into town. Tom would still be grounded, so I figured I’d see what Joe Harper was up to.


End file.
